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This is the sort of thing that makes America great:

The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston. "I believe your ... profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts That Make the Holiday a Time to Party"* by Mark Williams, a feature pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolons--a hallmark, I would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was largely unaltered.

As the reporter digs through back issues of the Bulletin, he discovers that it actually seems to contain not merely a great deal of plagarized content, but to contain exclusively plagarized content. Which leads him to think exactly what I'm thinking:

At times over the last month, I've doubted that the Bulletin actually exists. A tiny newspaper from the Houston suburbs, filled week after week with bowdlerized Joe Conason columns and record reviews airlifted from the pages of Slate? It seemed preposterous, and the longer I spent squinting into the mustard-and-magenta glow of the Bulletin's Web 0.0-quality Internet site, the more I began to suspect that I was the dupe of a conceptual art prank, a cheeky Borgesian commentary on the slipperiness of language and authorship. Or something.

But I telephoned the offices of Montgomery County's reputable daily, the Courier, and reporters there assured me that the Bulletin indeed exists. A Courier staffer picked up a copy at a shop in Conroe, Texas, and mailed it to me, and as I type these words I am looking at the front page of the Bulletin's latest edition, Volume 38, Issue 26, with a color cover photograph of Austin blues-rockers the Band of Heathens beneath the headline "Hot Summer, Hot Texas Music: New Lone Star CD Releases That Make the Summer Sizzle."